Stereo: Comparative Perspectives on the Sociological Study of Popular Music in France and Britain

Philippe Le Guern, Hugh Dauncey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138274976
• eBook ISBN: 9781317050018
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

The term 'Popular Music' has traditionally denoted different things in France and Britain. In France, the very concept of 'popular' music has been fiercely debated and contested, whereas in Britain and more largely throughout what the French describe as the 'Anglo-saxon' world 'popular music' has been more readily accepted as a description of what people do as leisure or consume as part of the music industry, and as something that academics are legitimately entitled to study. French researchers have for some decades been keenly interested in reading British and American studies of popular culture and popular music and have often imported key concepts and methodologies into their own work on French music, but apart from the widespread use of elements of 'French theory' in British and American research, the 'Anglo-saxon' world has remained largely ignorant of particular traditions of the study of popular music in France and specific theoretical debates or organizational principles of the making and consuming of French musics. French, British and American research into popular music has thus coexisted - with considerable cross-fertilization - for many years, but the barriers of language and different academic traditions have made it hard for French and anglophone researchers to fully appreciate the ways in which popular music has developed in their respective countries and the perspectives on its study adopted by their colleagues. This volume provides a comparative and contrastive perspective on popular music and its study in France and the UK.

Chapter 1
Top of the Pops, or Gilbert and Maritie Carpentier? Ways of Doing and Thinking Popular Music in Britain and France

Hugh Dauncey and Philippe Le Guern

This volume is the most recent result of some ten years or so of research collaboration between the editors. Whereas the British editor is a specialist in French Studies in the UK interested in a variety of forms of French popular culture – music and sport in particular, the French editor is a French academic specializing in the sociology of music and popular culture, principally in France, but also in Britain as well. Early in our working together, we quickly realized that some of our own preconceptions about the politics, economics and sociology of what we were studying in the other’s country were perhaps not quite as accurate as they should be, and that work on teasing out the actual realities of music and popular culture was of particular usefulness to us as partners in research projects focusing either on the UK or on France or comparatively. Moreover, talking to colleagues in France and Britain about these kinds of subjects convinced us that there was an equally important operation to be undertaken of explaining and deconstructing many of the ways of thinking about music and popular culture in France held by British academics, and equally, the understandings and misconceptions of British popular culture cherished by French researchers.

It was thus that after an initial volume edited on French popular music from chanson to techno published by Ashgate in 2003,1 ongoing discussions between us and other colleagues about cultural policies in our two countries regarding popular music and the differing ways in which this particular form of popular culture was perceived by academia led to the constitution of a small team of French and British researchers commissioned to produce a collection of expert survey-analyses describing and reflecting upon the ways in which popular music has been studied in academic research on both sides of the Channel since the 1950s also including where relevant, some more practical considerations of developments in politics, mediation or other topics. These individual studies – with those originally written in English translated into French and organized in pairs of chapters to provide a comparative perspective – formed the basis of the edited volume Stéréo: Sociologie comparée des musiques populaires France/G.-B. published in France in late 2008 by the Centre d’information et de ressources pour les musiques actuelles (Irma)2 in partnership with the specialized music-publisher Mélanie Seteun.3 This volume has been extremely well received in France where – although much research on popular culture in general and on music in particular is often inspired by American and British authors, the fact that these studies are available only in their original versions poses difficulties of access and fine understanding – the possibility of reading in version française how the study of popular music has been ‘done’ in the UK was a considerable advantage. Moreover, the ‘French’ half of the volume provided a very useful survey of the development over recent decades of a field of academic study in France which has for a long time struggled to achieve credibility in an environment of research where the ‘popular’ in all its forms was for a long time disqualified as a subject for serious academic inquiry, and by bringing together a number of summary-analyses of how music has been studied, the book provided something of an aide-mémoire for French researchers themselves on the development of their field. Successful in France, the volume was however the object of frustration in the UK, where the British contributors – although several were able to read the insights of their French counterparts in the language of Molière – were keen to see the volume translated into English in order to better understand the differences and similarities between their approaches to the study of popular music and those characteristic of French research. It was thus that the current volume saw the light of day, generously recognized by Ashgate as a worthwhile contribution to the better comprehension – through the Franco-British comparative perspective – of popular music in France, in Britain, and in general.

The work of translation of the French contributions, although ultimately successful in rendering both the content and the tenor of the original French texts, has been challenging, and merits perhaps a brief note of explanation here. One of the stereotypes of French academic writing held by British and American researchers – or as the French tend to call them, the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ – is that French texts tend to be abstruse, complicated, wordy and circumlocutory, with their expression verging on the obscurantist. Unfortunately, the experience of working together on this current book has led the editors to conclude, regretfully, that in this case at least, the stereotype is not too far from the truth. Whereas translation of most French texts into English often results in savings of 10 per cent of total word length (in reflection of the ‘wordiness’ of French and the ‘concision’ of English!), here we have been unable to find such economies of conversion, such has been the necessity to make meanings as clear as possible for an Anglophone and UK/US readership unaccustomed to the specific debates and issues in question. Moreover, the frequent need to gloss organizations, principles and mechanisms specific to the French institutional and academic context of popular music has created extra material without which the messages of our French authors might have failed to be properly communicated. The translations are not works of art; but they do render faithfully as many of the subtleties of the analysis as possible, while at the same time retaining enough of a taste of the undoubted complexity of expression of our Gallic contributors.

Many French academics have for a long time suffered from something of an inferiority complex concerning their own abilities to say anything new about popular culture, such as has seemed to be to them the volume and quality of research produced, for decades, by American and British scholars. This point is touched upon and discussed more fully by a number of the French contributors to this volume, who explain how French research on popular culture in general and popular music in particular has often suffered from a kind of double disqualification both by an academic and intellectual system which has traditionally favoured ‘élite’ cultural forms and practices, and by the perceived backwardness and simplicity of French conceptualizations and research methods compared with those – imported slowly and late in translation or received more quickly but perhaps more imperfectly in the original English – of British and American specialists. Additionally, and it is another point which arises in various chapters, where French research on popular culture and popular music did occur, it was disappointing to many more sociologically-inspired academics for its general and ‘philosophical’ approaches, thought to be lacking in the social-science seriousness of UK/US ethnographic or more quantitative investigations. But whatever their insecurities (and some compensating elements of self-satisfaction) vis-à-vis ‘Anglo-Saxon’ research, the French have remained durably intrigued both by UK/US traditions of research into popular music and by the musical, cultural, social, political and economic practices which they take as their subject matter.

To adopt for a short while a specifically French perspective, and consider the introductory remarks made in the French version of this current volume, only ten years or so ago, the idea that a young aspiring academic could make a career in the French university system on the basis of a PhD on popular music was extremely brave, naive, or simply unrealistic. Such a post grad student would have looked enviously at the situation which appeared so much more favourable in the UK, where university lecturers were free and happy to write on the Pet Shop Boys or the Clash, to muse on the respective merits of technologies such as the Roland TR 808 or the Akaï S1000 and their significance for techno or electronic genres, or even, study entirely seriously the social meaning of Madonna. Inhibited by the theories of cultural legitimacy propounded by Pierre Bourdieu which constrained the intellectual space available for the study of the ‘popular’, and having so efficiently internalized the hierarchies of intellectually acceptable subjects of academic study, French researchers saw such British studies as astonishingly novel and risky initiatives to undertake in their own professional universe. Another feature of British academia which surprised, even shocked French researchers some ten years ago was the dual status of some of their UK colleagues who were simultaneously extremely well-known rock critics4 as well as university researchers, or who were practising or past musicians.5 In traditional French university terms, such a status was indicative of lack of distance and objectivity from the subject of study, as was indeed the way in which French researchers perceived the tone and nature of much of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ rock/popular music criticism and academic research as being ‘disinhibited’ and closer to the idea of listening pleasure contained within the experience of popular music. In general, French academia saw British and US research as more free to tackle subjects of significance whatever their place in a cultural hierarchy, and their desire to follow suit was particularly strengthened by the contributions of Cultural studies perspectives, as they fed into French research in the late 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

However, although many of these French inhibitions were actually the case, in various ways, recent studies have demonstrated that the sociology of popular music is not an entirely new invention in France after all.6 As we shall see in detail in subsequent chapters of this volume, French research has developed in a dialogue between ‘Anglo-Saxon’ theoretical and methodological influences imported into France either quickly in English, or much more slowly in translation, and existing French structures of academia and intellectual values. The first studies of yé-yé music and its stars appeared at the end of the 1960s, and during the 1970s, in a period of considerable socioeconomic and sociocultural change, the links between ‘youth’ and popular music began to be explored using a variety of analytical and ideological perspectives, with, interestingly, Marxist interpretations failing to gain the same hold on the study of popular music as they did on literature at the same time.7 During the 1970s, French studies began to draw parallels between life-styles and genres of music, somewhat in the same way that Hebdige was able to define meanings of style for mods and rockers towards the end of the decade. In the 1980s, French research developed to take account of ‘work’ in the cultural sector, analysing musicians’ careers – in amateur or ‘professional’ music – and undertaking ethnographic studies of rehearsals or live performances. Also during the 1980s, other French researchers – using the recently invented term of ‘amplified musics’ as the basis for their focuses, stressed the inseparability of musical practice and listening to music from the physical and material conditions of their production and dissemination. This strand in analysis attached central importance to musical instruments, to amplifiers and to sound systems, giving them a significance sufficient to justify their inclusion in the seriously thought-out museum exhibitions. Simultaneously, researchers such as Antoine Hennion reconsidered issues of taste and of individuals’ passionate enthusiasm for the musics they like, examining fan behaviour and attempting to pull the centre of ideological and theoretical gravity for studies of music away from the gravitational pull of Bourdieu’s notions of cultural legitimacy. Although French sociological studies of popular music have indeed come a long way since the 1960s in terms of their freedom to address a wider variety of issues and in terms of the abilities of individual researchers to actually build careers within French academia on popular culture and popular music, there is still an enduring suspicion that the lesser exposure of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ researchers to restrictive hierarchies of cultural values (for cultural consumption and for academic study) makes their studies somehow different and more valuable than those produced in France. This current volume should hopefully go some small way, at least, towards enabling music-loving sociologists of culture on either side of the Channel to better decide for themselves on the relative merits of Gallic and UK/US approaches.

A concrete example of what French people in general and French researchers into popular music tend to see as the fundamental difference between popular music in the UK and in France is furnished by the contrast perceived between the one British television programme relating to music that is almost universally known in France – Top of the Pops – and the presenters of numerous French television shows on music produced during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, known by almost no-one outside of France and in France by few under the age of 40: the married duo Maritie et Gilbert Carpentier. The famous French rock critic Jérôme Soligny once remarked to the French author of this introduction that it is the difference between Top of the Pops – a symbol of youth and change and revolt and popular culture – and the bland, traditional, culturally conservative, linguistically protective, musically unadventurous style of programmes and music showcased by the Carpentiers that summarizes the gulf between French and British/American popular music.8 Quite how far this example of a difference between programmes presenting French ‘variété’ music in the 1960s and 1970s can really illustrate an overall trend is debatable, but Soligny’s quip does serve to exemplify the enduring French inferiority complex about music and popular culture that can so undermine both practice and academic analysis. And the concept of ‘variété’ as a genre leads us to another consideration, that of the dominant influence of chanson over much of French music, especially ‘variétés’ in the period when the Carpentiers held sway over music on French television but also in more contemporary times, where enduring concern over ‘text’ and lyrics and the use of the French language has led to one of the features of French popular music and broadcasting that is – unlike the Carpentiers – generally known to analysts in the UK/US, namely the quotas imposing minimum volumes of French music on French radio stations.9 These quotas imposed from 1994 and adapted in various ways since the late 1990s have been an example of what stereotypical interpretations of French cultural and broadcasting policies would see as statist intervention typical of a volontarist state aiming to protect national culture against globalized commercial culture. We shall see in later discussions in various chapters how simplistic views held on either side of the Channel about French interventionism and British cultural and commercial laisser-faire need to be nuanced and qualified, and this kind of cliché is but one of many which this volume hopes to be able to dispel.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Top of the Pops, or Gilbert and Maritie Carpentier? Ways of Doing and Thinking Popular Music in Britain and France
• 2 Writing the History of Popular Music
• 3 Charting the History of Amplified Musics in France
• 4 Popular Music Policy in the UK
• 5 Cultural Policies and Popular/Contemporary/Amplified Musics in France
• 6 The UK Music Economy
• 7 The Economics of Music in France
• 8 Mediation of Popular Music in the UK
• 9 Music and the Media in France: The Sociological Viewpoint
• 10 Genres and the Aesthetics of Popular Music in the UK
• 11 The Issue of Musical Genres in France
• 12 Mapping British Music Audiences: Subcultural, Everyday and Mediated Approaches
• 13 Music Audiences, Cultural Hierarchies and State Interventionism: A Typically French Model?
• 14 Is it Different for Girls? Unpacking Sheffield’s ‘Scene’
• 15 Local Music Scenes in France: Definitions, Stakes, Particularities
• Bibliography
• Index